Conventional dead ends anchor electrical transmission lines to supporting structures, such as towers or poles. Dead ends include a mechanism for gripping a cable or conductor so that tension on the line is delivered through the insulated mount to the tower or pole. Conventional dead ends often include clamps compressed together by nuts and bolts, but the effectiveness thereof decreases over time as over-tightening of the nuts and bolts can cause metal fatigue and, eventually, failure.
Some conventional dead ends include spring loaded wedge-shaped jaws for gripping cables or conductors. Though this is an improvement over the dead ends comprising clamps compressed together by nuts and bolts, the spring loaded dead ends have problems with their interlock features.
A need exists for a dead end clamp configured to attach a cable or a power conductor to a power pole through an insulator device with a single body jaw guide and a streamlined locking mechanism to prevent the jaws from sliding out of the jaw guide.